Monday, May 25, 2020

Ryzen 7 4700G Reportedly Pushes AMD APUs To Eight Cores

There have been several stories about the leaked upcoming AMD 4700G APU processor.  I was hoping that this would be an Xbox Series X equivalent.  Although the processor has 8 cores, it only has 8 graphics compute units.  The upcoming Xbox Series X (AMD made) chip has 52 graphics compute units on the processor.  On a single chip, they have a powerful processor and the equivalent of a top of the line graphics card.

So it looks like if I want Xbox Series X graphics power on a computer that I will only be able to get it by purchasing a separate graphics card.  I thought that the point of an AMD APU was so that you don't have to buy a separate graphics card, but this might be a deliberate strategy by AMD to sell graphics cards.  

But if AMD is going to make a powerful all in one chip for the upcoming Xbox Series X, why won't they release that to everyone else?

Monday, May 4, 2020

Computer programs

Computer programs are made up of a series of instructions that computers understand. This is no problem when your computer program is ten lines long, but some modern programs, like operating systems, might have millions of lines of code. Since it only takes one bad line of code to really mess things up, the length of computer programs becomes a problem due to increased complexity.

So the biggest problem that software development has faced has been one of organization. People have had to invent ways to keep computer programs more organized. When I was going to school in the 1980s, the buzzword was "structured programming", which doesn't really do that much. This was later replaced by "Object-Oriented" programming, which was a breakthrough in organizing computer code.

However, I keep thinking that there has to be a better way. I don't know what that better way is, but I'm sure that eventually someone will invent a new method.

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